https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6Hb7J5yFPg&ab_channel=BehindTheHeadlines
Monday, December 28, 2020
Sanders Rips GOP for Happily Endorsing Trump's Assault on Democracy But Refusing to Back His Call for $2,000 Checks
"Pathetic," said the Vermont senator.
by
Jake Johnson, staff writer
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/12/25/sanders-rips-gop-happily-endorsing-trumps-assault-democracy-refusing-back-his-call
More than half of the House Republican caucus readily supported President Donald Trump in his last-ditch—and ultimately failed—attempt to overturn the November election through the Supreme Court earlier this month, but the president's endorsement this week of $2,000 relief checks for desperate Americans was a bridge too far for the GOP.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) noted that fact with disgust Thursday, shortly after House Republicans blocked a Democratic attempt to pass $2,000 direct payments by unanimous consent.
Earlier this month, as Common Dreams reported, more than 100 House Republicans signed on to a Texas-led lawsuit that sought what one analyst described as "the single biggest incident of voter nullification in American history." The U.S. Supreme Court rejected the lawsuit just days after it was filed."Republicans in Washington are happy to cheer on Trump's bogus conspiracy theories on non-existent election fraud, but refuse to support him when it comes to providing a $2,000 direct payment to working-class Americans facing economic desperation," the Vermont senator tweeted. "Pathetic."
"House Republicans are spending critical time when people are starving and small businesses are shuttering trying to overturn the results of our election," Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) said just before the Supreme Court rejected the suit.
On Thursday morning, despite the president's demand for larger checks, the House Republican leadership refused to allow Democrats to advance an amendment that would increase the direct payments in the newly passed coronavirus relief bill from $600 to $2,000. House Democrats plan to force a floor vote on the direct payments on Monday.
"House Democrats today offered to send you $2,000 stimulus checks. Republicans rejected it," Rep. Bill Pascrell, Jr. (D-N.J.) tweeted Thursday. "In May, we voted to send you $1,200 stimulus checks. Republicans rejected that too. The Republican Party does not give a damn about you."
The Year That Labor Hung On By Its Fingertips
Disasters, missed opportunities, and a few bright spots in 2020.
December 26, 2020 Hamilton Nolan WORKING IN THESE TIMES
https://portside.org/2020-12-26/year-labor-hung-its-fingertips
A lot of things happened for working people this year, and most of them were bad. But even in a year as deranged as 2020, the broader themes that afflict and energize the labor movement have carried on. If you are reading this, congratulations: There is still time for you to do something about all of these things. Here is a brief look at the Year in Labor, and may we never have to live through something like it again.
The pandemic
Broadly speaking, there have been two very large labor stories this year. The first is, “I have been forced into unemployment due to the pandemic, and I am scared.” And the second is, “I have been forced to continue working during the pandemic, and I am scared.” America’s labor reporters spent most of our year writing variations of these stories, in each company and in each industry and in each city. Those stories continue to this day.
The federal government left working people utterly forsaken. They did not create a national wage replacement system to pay people to stay home, as many European nations did. OSHA was asleep on the job, uninterested in workplace safety related to coronavirus. Republicans in Congress were more intent on getting liability protections for employers than on doing anything, anything at all, that might help desperate regular people. And, of course, Trump and his allies unnecessarily politicized public health, leading directly to hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths and the economic destruction that goes with that. It was a bad year. The larger political institutions created to protect workers did not do their jobs. The labor movement was left very much on its own. And its own track record was mixed.
Front-line workers
The year of the hero! We love our heroes! Our front-line workers, our delivery people and sanitation workers and bus drivers, our paramedics and nurses, our cooks and cleaners and grocery workers: We love you all! Sure, we will bang pots and pans to celebrate regular workers who had to push through during the pandemic, and we will write you nice notes and have school children draw signs celebrating you. But will you get paid for this?
How well have unions representing these front line workers done this year? In many cases, not well. I think first of the grocery workers, represented by UFCW, who were generally awarded with temporary “hazard pay” bonuses rather than actual raises. Or of the UFCW’s meatpacking workers, whose plants were encouraged to stay open by an executive order, and who suffered terribly from the coronavirus and from management’s utter disdain for their welfare. These are workers who, particularly during the early phase of the pandemic, had a ton of leverage. Had they struck, or walked out, asking for basic safety and fair pay for risking their lives, the public would have neared panic, and their demands probably would have been met. Their employers would have had no choice. Instead, there was a great deal of outcry from their unions, but no real labor actions at scale. Thus, the meatpacking workers continued to suffer, and the grocery workers saw their “hazard pay” bonuses disappear, and here we are.
The point of this is not to be harsh. Faced with an unexpected disaster, most unions have spent this year scrambling desperately to keep themselves and their workers afloat, and have been flooded with the task of dealing with the catastrophe that has cost millions their jobs. But when this is all over, there should be a serious postmortem about what could and should have been done better. And that will include, right up top, the failure of front line workers to turn their newfound hero status — and the temporary, absolute necessity that they continue working through life-threatening conditions — into any lasting gains. It is easy to surrender to the feeling of just being thankful to be employed while others sink into poverty. But we need to be ready with a better plan for next time. Billions of dollars and a good deal of potential power that working people could have had has evaporated because unions were not prepared to act to take it.
Public workers
Teachers unions conclusively demonstrated their value this year. In general, in cities with strong teachers unions, public schools did not reopen unless the teachers were satisfied that adequate workplace safety procedures were in place. (In practice this meant that many school districts simply kept instruction online.) While this earned the ire of some parents, they should think it through: Workplace safety in America only existed where unions were strong enough to see to it that it happened. Schools were the most prominent example of that.
Elsewhere, the news for federal government employees was gloomy. The Trump administration waged a years-long war against the labor rights of federal workers, and it is fair to say that the unions lost that war. Federal employee unions in particular, and state employee unions in Republican states, have become pathetically weak. Much of their bargaining power has been outlawed by Republican politicians. The unions have been reduced to writing politely angry letters as their workers are abused while waiting for a new Democratic administration that they can beg to restore their rights. It is not a workable model for a union. These unions must decide at some point that they are willing to break the law in order to assert the fundamental rights of their members, or they will grow increasingly less able to demonstrate to members why they have any value.
That may not be fair, but it’s the truth.
Organizing
The biggest issue for unions in America — bigger than any pandemic or presidential election cycle — is that there are simply not enough union members. Only one in 10 workers is a union member. In the private sector, that figure is just over 6%. The decades-long decline of union density is the underlying thing robbing the once-mighty labor movement (and by extension, the working class itself) of power. If unions in America are not growing every year, they are dying.
Disastrous years like 2020 tend to put structural issues on the back burner, but they can also serve as inspirations for people to join unions to protect them. The annual figures for the year are not out yet, but anecdotally, union leaders and organizers are optimistic that the pandemic’s havoc will serve as fuel for future organizing. Most unions managed to at least continue major organizing efforts that were already underway this year, like SEIU’s successful conclusion of a 17-year battle to unionize 45,000 child care providers in California. Industries that were already hotbeds of organizing tended to remain so. The safety net of a union contract clearly demonstrated its value far and wide this year, at least in the ability of union members to negotiate terms for furloughs and severance and recall rights and all the other things that matter during disasters, as non-union workers were simply cast out on their own.
Still, it is up to unions themselves to have a concerted plan to take advantage of the widespread national suffering and channel it into new organizing. Since unions have spent the year transfixed by the election and by trying to respond to the economic collapse, it is safe to say that such a concerted plan does not really exist yet. That needs to be done, soon, or this moment will have been wasted.
Strikes
During the early months of the pandemic, a fragile sort of labor peace reigned. The grip of the crisis was such that most workers were simply trying to hang on. As time went by, and the failures of employers became more clear, that peace began to evaporate. Teachers unions around the country used credible strike threats to head off unsafe school opening plans. And in the healthcare industry, unions have had multiple strikes, as nurses and hospital workers have passed their breaking points.
Leverage for workers varies widely by industry right now, as certain industries are besieged with unemployed workers looking for any job they can get (restaurants), and others are desperate for skilled workers, who are extremely vital (nurses). At minimum, every union should look at its leverage in the specific context of the pandemic and ask if they should act now, lest an opportunity be lost forever.
Gig workers
You can think of many enormous companies as huge algorithms that are making their way through the American labor force, turning employees into independent contractors or freelancers or part-timers. There is money to be made in freeing businesses from the responsibility and cost of providing for employees (a status that comes with benefits and a host of workplace rights, including the right to unionize). The “gig economy” is not just Uber and Lyft and Instacart and other companies that exclusively work in that space — it is an economic force of nature pushing every company, including yours, to get your job off its books, and to turn you into something less than a full employee.
Countering this force is probably the single most important legal and legislative issue for labor as a whole, because this process inherently acts to dissolve labor power. Unfortunately, the most important thing that happened on the issue this year was the passage of Prop 22 in California, legislation specifically designed to empower the gig economy companies to the detriment of workers. Scarier yet is the fact that the successful legislation in California will now be used as a blueprint for state legislation around the country. Companies are prepared to spend hundreds of millions or billions of dollars on this issue, because they save far more money on the back end and preserve their business model, which depends in large part in extracting wealth that once went to workers and redirecting it towards investors. Either America will have a national reckoning with what the gig economy is doing to us, or we will continue barreling towards a dystopian future of the Uber-ization of every last industry. Including yours. If ever there were a good time to launch a worker coop, it is now.
The election and Washington
After an early period of hope for a Bernie-led insurgency of the left, unions coalesced around Biden. They spent a ton of money on him, and indeed, his rhetoric and his platform are both more definitively pro-union than any president in decades. Unions expect a lot of things from Biden, and experience tells us that they will not get many of them.
What they will probably get: a much better NLRB, a functioning OSHA, a pro-labor Labor Department rather than the opposite, and, particularly for unions with longstanding ties to Biden, relatively good access to the White House. What they probably won’t get: passage of the PRO Act, a very good bill that would fix many of the worst problems with U.S. labor law, but which has no hope in a divided Congress. (And, I suspect, even with full Democratic control of Congress, many of the more centrist Democrats would suddenly find a reason to oppose the act if the Chamber of Commerce ever thought it might actually pass). It is true that the center of the Democratic Party is slowly moving left, but Biden is a man who naturally stays in the middle of everyone, and he will be conservative in his willingness to burn political capital by pushing pro-labor policies that don’t enjoy some amount of public bipartisan support. The political climate for unions will be similar to what it was under Obama. The words will be nicer, but any action will have to be propelled by people in the streets.
The nine-month odyssey between the passage of the CARES Act and the next relief bill that Congress actually passed is a useful demonstration of the limits of labor’s lobbying power. While particular unions, especially those in transportation and the USPS, showed skill at getting concrete material gains for their members into bills, the inability to force any sort of timely action from Congress in the face of massive human suffering shows that labor as a special interest will never have the political power it craves. Until many, many more Americans are union members, it will be impossible to break out of this trap.
The labor movement at its highest level must break itself of the addiction to the false belief that salvation will be found if only our Democrat can win the next election. It won’t. Organize millions of new workers and teach them to always be ready to strike. The Democratic Party must be dragged towards progress by an army, and our army is weak. The AFL-CIO got burned in the protests this year. It remains to be seen if it learned anything from that.
Ending on a positive note
It may be the perpetual nature of unions that the leadership is often disappointing, but the grassroots are always inspiring. The big picture for organized labor in 2020 has been… close to okay, in some aspects, but certainly not great. But when you pull out a magnifying glass and look at what individual workers and workplaces and units are doing, you will find thousands and thousands of inspiring things. And not even a pandemic has changed the basic fact that organizing is the most powerful tool that regular people have at their disposal in a system that values capital over humanity.
If you are an employee, you can unionize your workplace. If you are a gig or temporary worker, you can organize with your coworkers. If you are unemployed, you can march in the streets now, and unionize your next job. All the labor movement is is all of us.
BIDEN: Status Quo Protector -- "Nothing Will Fundamentally Change"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-2v8EUnC0uc&ab_channel=SUVRVingSUVRVing
The Censored Day One Agenda For Pres. Biden
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iq0R1e17J00&ab_channel=RedactedTonight
Sunday, December 27, 2020
FORCE THE VOTE!
We demand that every progressive in Congress refuse to vote for Nancy Pelosi for Speaker of the House until she publicly pledges to bring Medicare for all to the floor of the House for a vote in January.
VISIT THE WEBSITE AND SIGN THE PETITION!
https://forcethevote.org/
VISIT THE WEBSITE AND SIGN THE PETITION!
https://forcethevote.org/
Connecticut educators denounce right-wing record of Biden’s pick for Education Secretary
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/12/24/card-d24.html?pk_campaign=newsletter&pk_kwd=wsws
Robert Milkowski
24 December 2020
The response of the corporate media and the teachers unions to President-elect Joe Biden’s selection of Miguel Cardona as his nominee for Education Secretary has been nothing short of effusive.
In the eyes of the Democratic Party and all of its backers, Cardona’s two chief qualifications for the position are that he is Latino and that he has forcefully advocated the reopening of schools during the pandemic as Connecticut’s commissioner of education. If Biden takes office in January, Cardona will immediately promote racial politics to accelerate the school reopening policies pursued by the Trump administration, fraudulently claiming this will be for the benefit of “black and brown” students.
In its article, headlined, “Biden Picks Latino Chief of Connecticut Schools as Education Secretary,” the New York Times glowingly wrote, “The selection of Dr. Cardona, a Latino, would fulfill Mr. Biden’s campaign promise to appoint a diverse cabinet and a secretary of education with public school experience—a blunt juxtaposition to Ms. DeVos, a billionaire champion of private schools that she and her children attended.”
The Times quotes multiple union officials praising Cardona, including Stuart Beckford, the second vice president of the Hartford Federation of Teachers, who states, “He has provided the stability the state has needed, and also focusing on equity and diversity.” The article quotes American Federation of Teachers (AFT) President Randi Weingarten, who hailed Cardona’s “deep respect for educators and their unions.”
The Times writes, “Teachers in Connecticut, who endorsed Dr. Cardona’s nomination, said that his leadership had struck the right balance of transparency and flexibility, even during the coronavirus crisis.”
In fact, the “teachers in Connecticut” referred to are the Board of Education Union Coalition, including the Connecticut Education Association (CEA), the American Federation of Teachers Connecticut, and state affiliates of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and the United Auto Workers (UAW).
The union bureaucrats that co-signed an endorsement of Cardona inhabit a different world than the rank-and-file educators that teach and work in schools across Connecticut, whose lives have been thoroughly endangered by the policies pursued by Cardona.
When the CEA posted their endorsement of Cardona on their Facebook page, they were met with a torrent of denunciations by Connecticut educators, with one commenting, “Commissioner Cardona has played fast and loose with teachers’ and students’ lives, and is not pro-teacher. The CEA should be embarrassed at this political pandering, and should never have put teachers’ support in their endorsement. CEA support of this potential nomination is yet another slap in the face to the teachers it is supposed to represent.”
Dr. Tina Manus, a public school teacher in Connecticut, told the World Socialist Web Site, “The fact that the Education Union Coalition endorsed Miguel Cardona without surveying members is disgusting. No action taken by them speaks more to their tone deaf approach to leading educators in CT, as well as their blatant and purposeful disconnection from the Rank and File.”
Dr. Manus added that Cardona “put the entire state of CT at risk, opening schools and allowing those schools to become vectors of community COVID-19 transmission. His policies are the reason COVID numbers went up and poor communities are suffering now…. He further exacerbated the already wide gaps in economics, social class and healthcare poor communities suffer within.”
Nicole Rizzo, who has been teaching in Connecticut for seven years, and is also an organizer for Connecticut Public School (CTPS) Advocates, told Newsweek magazine Cardona “was biased in his representation of reopening schools. The metrics that he and the governor proposed for school reopening, they continually revised without explanation.”
She added, “Many of these schools are lacking basic, rudimentary resources including personal protective equipment and sanitization products.”
Rizzo conducted a survey on the (CTPS) Advocates Facebook page in reaction to the Education Union Coalition’s endorsement of Cardona, which found that an extremely small percentage of the 392 educators polled supported his nomination (7.1 percent), while the majority voted against him (92.9 percent).
Another Connecticut teacher, Thea Bell, told the WSWS, “Cardona has not spent much time in a classroom and apparently fast tracked it out as soon as he could. He smiles all the time when people are suffering. He delivers policy with a smug ‘let them eat cake’ smile of an elite who, now that he has risen above, could not care less about those still struggling.”
She added, “My school refused to allow me to teach remotely. They ultimately fired me for basically being medically fragile and high risk. At the last minute they rescinded my termination and put me on unpaid leave this year. My lawyer intervened. Cardona had NO plan to shield vulnerable educational workers in his demand to open face to face. Instead, he is letting teachers fight singular legal battles, lose their jobs, retire, get fired, etc.”
Since the summer, Cardona has joined Connecticut’s Democratic Governor Ned Lamont in falsely claiming that schools are not vectors for the spread of COVID-19. In an op-ed in the News-Times last week, without citing any evidence, Cardona claimed, “Cases reported by schools, which include students who are in full remote learning, are being traced back to community spread happening outside the building.”
A Hartford educator who chose to remain anonymous spoke about this to the WSWS, stating, “Cardona never allowed for the possibility of school closures. He claimed teachers would receive PPE, but no improvements made to ventilation systems in extremely old buildings. Data was being manipulated; the CSDE kept saying kids don't contract the virus to justify the reopening. The decisions were not based in reality. They kept moving the goalposts on what would require a closing, and Cardona didn't listen to the teachers pleading not to reopen the schools. Teachers have gotten sick and some have died.”
He continued, “The state's own reopening safety thresholds were set at 25 out of 100,000 as the trigger to move to full remote. We moved way beyond those thresholds. As the infection rates rose, the CSDE just kept re-writing the reopening plan... moving the safety threshold. We documented all of it. Our numbers of infection are now way over 100 out of 100,000 in some towns. He does not care, he wants it open for optics. I would say also because now it seems to suggest he has ‘found a way’ to keep it open.”
In concluding he said, “We have had several iterations of the Connecticut school reopening plan. Again, the CSDE just kept rewriting it as the infection rates rocketed. They gaslit everyone. It's been really tragic for many. I no longer want to be an educator. There is no integrity in the public system.”
As a result of these and other policies implemented by the state’s Democratic politicians, Connecticut now has the fifth highest ratio of deaths per person among all US states. In total, 170,705 of the state’s 3.6 million residents have been infected with COVID-19 and 5,736 people have died. Cases have surged in the past two months following the reopening of schools throughout the state, with a record 8,129 cases on December 7.
Educators must draw the necessary conclusions from Biden’s selection of Cardona, which underscores that his administration will pursue the same homicidal policies as the Trump administration of opening all schools and nonessential businesses as the pandemic rages.
Although the Democrats’ tactics may vary, their fundamental goal—keeping the economy open in the interests of Wall Street—remains the same. Both parties are beholden to the same ruling elite, whose wealth has vastly increased alongside the ever-greater suffering and death of workers during this global pandemic.
Educators and all workers must organize themselves independently of both corporate-controlled parties and the pro-capitalist unions, through the formation of rank-and-file safety committees. These committees must prepare for a political general strike, with the goal of closing all schools and nonessential businesses to stop the spread of the pandemic and save lives.
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